/ARTS WEEKLY/ARCHAEOLOGY-CHINA: Birds-from-Dinosaurs Theory Takes Flight

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

LONDON, Aug 27 2002 (IPS) - Controversy and treachery dog the unravelling of one of nature’s great mysteries, which had puzzled scientists for more than 140 years. But now, paleontologists seem to have shrugged off doubts and come to support the long-disputed theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

The Natural History Museum in London, a world leader in fossil conservation, is giving its weight of authority to a string of new discoveries in China’s north-eastern Liaoning province, which offer thought-provoking evidence to back the dino-bird theory.

‘Dino-Birds: the Feathered Dinosaurs of China’, a collection of China’s newly unearthed specimen, premiered in July under the gold-gilded domes of the museum.

It is the first time for an European audience to see the amazing findings of local farmers –turned fossil hunters in Liaoning — one of the world’s richest fossil areas.

The exhibition features the original 124-million-year-old ‘Fuzzy raptor’s fossil and another 12 dino-bird fossils on loan from the Geological Museum of China, many being the only example of their particular species in existence.

“The fossils distinctly display delicate feather impressions,” said renowned dinosaur expert and associate keeper of paleontology at the Natural History Museum, Dr Angela Milner. “The creatures being discovered in Liaoning province died very quickly after being covered in volcanic dust. Their bodies have been remarkably well preserved — like the ancient humans in Pompeii.”

“The collection is a remarkable snapshot of evolution that took place million of years ago,” agress Dr Ji Qiang of the China Geological Museum. “The fossils unearthed in Liaoning are unique in their detailed preservation and prove that indeed, birds are descended from dinosaurs.”

From the 1861 discovery of Archaeopteryx — the most ancient bird known to science — scientists have debated the origins of birds.

During years of investigation, which took palaeontologists from Solnhofen in Germany to Latin America and China, many came to believe that not all dinosaurs died out but some evolved into birds and took off into flight.

However, evidence that dinosaurs had feathers — one of the most distinctive features of the birds — eluded scientists for years. Until one day in 1996, when local farmers in Liaoning unearthed a new specimen of dinosaur cloaked in downy, feather-like fibre.

Sinosauropteryx prima, meaning “first Chinese dinosaur bird”, provided the first evidence of a meat-eating dinosaur with a feathery coat. Some scientists believe that the fringe of fluff surrounding the body was a primitive type of feathery covering, useful for insulation in such a small dinosaur.

The discovery immediately grabbed the attention of the scientific world and marked Liaoning province as a spectacular fossil hot spot. Its rugged landscape these days is pockmarked with quarries, but researchers believe that 124 million years ago the place teemed with wildlife, where communities of animals lived around forested lakes and rivers.

Life was frequently interrupted by intense volcanic activity, which killed all nearby wildlife and yet preserved it in exquisite detail under layers of ash and dust. Local farmers have been collecting fossils for many years and using the numerous fish and reptile fossils they uncover as veritable cash crops.

Jumping on the bandwagon of publicity generated by this first discovery, some of them tried to hit the golden jackpot by ‘enhancing’ a few of the fossils they had unearthed in the local quarries.

In 1998, a new feathered dinosaur fossil was spirited out of China and sold to the Dinosaur Museum in Blanding, Utah in the United States. Unveiled with much fanfare by scientists as the “missing link” between birds and dinosaurs, Archaeoraptor was soon found to be a fakery that included the pasting of one part of the dinosaur’s tail to a bird fossil.

“At the time when the forgery was discovered, it was a setback for our research,” recalls Dr Ji Qiang. Caught between the excitement at home that birds took off in China and the criticism of scientific community abroad, for a while Chinese paleontologists felt downhearted and deserted.

Even more vexing was the fact that in a country undergoing wrenching market reforms, paleontological research lacked the cash needed for a scientific exploration. Eventually, it was the same spirit of gold-hunters among local farmers that led to Liaoning’s most spectacular discovery in 2000 — the unearthing of ‘Fuzzy raptor’.

The fossil had the bony skeleton of a predatory dinosaur but was fringed with a coat of perfectly preserved soft feathers. What really excited scientists was the discovery that ‘Fuzzy’ had a special wrist bone that allowed it to fold back its hands and whip them forward to grab at prey. The same action is the forerunner of part of the wing stroke in birds.

“This is the final proof to show that what developed first as a fluffy covering for insulation later became feathers for flight,” argues Ji Qiang.

Meanwhile, many other intermediate species, including Protarchaeopteryx, Confuciusornis and some well-evolved early birds were found in the geological strata in the same Liaoning area.

And while the scientific community grapples with questions critical to how exactly dino-birds took to the air, enlivened debate and international attention have forced arbitrary fossil hunting in Liaoning to a halt.

Fearing that wrong conservation techniques might destroy precious specimen findings in the future, provincial authorities in Liaoning recently passed legislation forbidding private exploration.